Since it have being already more than 3 weeks after the conference, and I still didn’t tell about everything I wanted to tell, I’ve made an executive decision to write one single post about the Application session I’ve attended, instead of writing a separate post about each of the papers. Otherwise it will never be completed!

The first one (and which I really liked) was the paper called “Understanding Computer Usage Evolution” by Dave Anastasiu and others from the University of Minnesota. This research was sponsored by Intel, and the basic idea was to track which percentage of the time a computer is in use is allocated for checking emails, watching movies, playing games, shopping, etc. The typical usages are considered “usage patterns” and then the typical evolutions of these patterns over time are analyzed

I’ve asked what is the purpose of this research, and the answer was – for targeted marketing, which makes sense. I was thinking, it would be a good idea to analyze how is the usage pattern different for one user between different devices.

The next one I really liked was the paper called “Fine-Grained Controversy Detection in Wikipedia” by Siarhei Bykau and others. Unfortunately, there is no poster available at the website, but in a nutshell, this research was focused on the issue of the wikipedia pages, which are updated very frequently, and thereby their contents id most likely controversial. Since many people heavily rely on the Wiki as a source of truth, the idea is – to find the way to identify such pages and to mark them accordingly.

And the last one was called “SHAHED: A MapReduce-based System for Querying and Visualizing Spatio-temporal Satellite Data”. The poster is here.

The paper addressed the question of querying the satellite data. What I didn’t realize before I attended this presentation was, that “we” (aka mankind) do have the satellite data for any point on the Earth surface for quite a long time, but the interesting question is, how to query these huge data volumes efficiently.

The authors of the paper describe indexes which they invented to be used on different levels of aggregation.

None of these presentations were directly related to what I am doing at work, but I still think they were very interesting, and just knowing these techniques exist, might be useful down the road.